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Vico’s Ring
101
«For out of the passions of men each bent on his private ad-
vantage, for the sake of which they would live like wild beasts in
the wilderness, it has made the civil institutions by which they
may live in human society» (§ 133)
236
.
There is more to the “semicontravariant” functor than these
three constants and “providence”, but they may suffice to pro-
vide evidence of its presence in his epistemology; while our lan-
guage is anachronistic, the concept and reality underlying it, is
not. Rather than considering these non-theoretical factors as het-
erogeneous, or
ad hoc
, to the theoretical framework, their inclu-
sion is a signal achievement
237
, and as we labored to argue, rather
the final essential epistemic piece according to our functorially-
oriented framework
238
. It also leads us to observe that, in effect,
we are dealing with two distinct “circular” processes, one of
which entangles – productively – “philosophy” and “philology”,
and the other, “philology” and the historical human world in its
cultural and socio-political dimensions
239
. And when speaking of
circularity, a distinction needs to be made between the “left-to-
right arrows” and “right-to-left arrows” that taken together make
up a “circle”, since forgetful and (semi)contravariant functors are
not simply reciprocal
240
. It does not preclude the use of tradition-
al and time-tested approaches in scientific inquiry, such as induc-
tion, deduction, hypothetico-deductive method, theory and con-
firmation,
a priori,
a posteriori
, and variants and combinations
thereof; however, they are best seen, and incorporated, as mere
moments of the overall gnoseological movement, without pre-
tension of standing for the whole. If the question is raised
whether Vico’s tendency is toward the empirical or the ration-
al/ideal, it would need to be modified to include also the theoret-
ical. If he is labelled at all, one would therefore have to allow
“theorist” in addition to “empiricist” and “rationalist”, but any
of these labels lose their meaning in the context of the insepara-
ble interactions of all three spheres
241
. The resultant inherent ep-
istemic instability and tension reflect the reality, and actual pro-